I think Joshua Ellis just made my blog obsolete with this amazing, somber, absolutely human post. Please, please read it. I also think, whenever I get down in the future, I will just go back and read this and spare everyone my take on contemporary sadness. Not that everyone’s pain isn’t valid, it is just so… the same. Without further ado, go read: Everyone I know is brokenhearted.
In celebration of reaching almost 500 followers on WordPress, I wanted to open up the floor for a little informal Q & A.
When I started this blog 1,5 years ago I really had no idea what kind of blogger I wanted to be. I thought I wanted to be a lifestyle/personal blogger but over the past year I have learned how much I truly value my privacy and not having to put every little thing out there. Not to mention, my life is really not that interesting! I’ve even stopped maintaining a personal Facebook because I just don’t see the point anymore, although I’m more than happy to creep on others! It also seems to me that personal bloggers tend to buy a lot of stuff to constantly show off and that’s really not going to work for me since my blog is basically an anti-blind-consumerism forum.
So here we are, and I’m very happy to be right here. I’ve really been enjoying the WordPress community lately and discovering a lot of insightful and well written blogs. As fun and frivolous as Instagram is, the blogging sphere is where I feel most at home. Over the past year, I have moved away from the more personal posts to cover issues that trouble and inspire me. It’s been a wonderful outlet for me and I feel so blessed for having such intelligent and compassionate readers. 90% of the comments I receive end up making my day because I get to feel heard and understood by people all over the world. What a gift writing has been and continue to be for me.
But it’s perfectly natural to feel curious about the person behind the words so consider this your chance if you have wanted to ask me a question, or for me to clarify anything I have written in the past. Let’s get to know each other a little better! Read More
In this post I’m going to talk about something that is difficult to talk about, but also very important. To me, it cuts to the very core of what it means to be human. The act of taking your own life. Humans are unique among the animals as in we are capable of deciding if we want to keep living or not. Do most people consider it a choice?
I don’t know if you are born an artist, or if you become one. I guess deep down I think everyone is an artist at heart, it’s the human condition to want to create something beautiful and meaningful, but not everyone feeds that particular beast.
I have all these moments from childhood that stand out to me, and lately I’ve been cataloging them to see if they can steer me on the right path since I’ve been feeling a little lost lately. I’ve always been kind of a loner and at age 9 my biggest luxury was to stay home alone and spend all day building and playing with pirate Lego. 
Pirates appealed to me from a very young age because they had two things I’ve always desired: absolutely freedom and tropical islands.
I could easily spend six hours or more totally engaged building ships and deserted islands with crumbing forts. I had an audio book of Treasure Island that I knew inside out, I had played it so many times, but it always help set the mood. My favorite part is the old, mysterious pirate who arrives at the inn in the beginning. It’s still one of my favorite books.
I liked Barbie dolls well enough; they are pretty and arrive with an array of nicknacks and I’m obsessively detailed oriented. My favorite part was to organize all of their cute things, figure out which outfit belonged to which doll, but they were too complete already for me to really play and get creative with. So as soon as I was old enough to have access to a camera I took my favorite girls and set out into the woods for Barbie photo shoots. My dolls posed on moss, by trees and in small streams. I have no idea what happened to all those photos but I can imagine my mom wasn’t too happy to get billed for dozens of doll photos. It kind of looked something like this… except not really.
Finally, as a teenager, I had a brief love affair with Wicca and witchcraft. I think it was a prelude to being almost-Goth later in high school. This was the dawn of internet as we know it and I exhausted our poor ’95 printer for anything about Wicca I could possibly find, including philosophies and spells, to make my own Book of Shadows. The internet was revolutionary for a kid like me. All of a sudden I was no longer limited to the books and stores I could find in my little town; suddenly I had access to everything. So I wanted to be a witch. Well, actually I wanted to be an actress, but Hollywood was awfully far away so this seemed like a decent second best so I cast spells about becoming an actress in the future. I remember the thing about casting spells is mainly about your intention more than the actual words but it was pretty hard for me to sit in a circle and say ‘I call upon the Goddess of the East, I call upon the Goddess of the South, etc’ while keeping my intentions pure and not ridiculous. I lived and breathed Anne Rice novels. I hoarded stones, salt and chicken bones in dainty little boxes, but my season as a witch was short-lived. Still, when I think back, I can recall my true intention with that little experience. It was about strength, it was about living a beautiful and ethereal life of my own making, in touch with what magic this world holds. It was about female energy and power, and to create a space where it was celebrated.
I’m dead serious with this one. You might be able to tell from the amount of times I will use the word ‘asshat’.
Ok, so global warming is a thing. It’s happening. I don’t care what you call it or where you think it came from – it is happening, it is a thing.
I’m not an expert but even I understand this. In very broad strokes it means that the global temperature is rising, which leads to ice melting in places where it hasn’t melted before in human history. That leads to global ocean levels rising which spells trouble for all the coastal cities out there (where the majority of humanity lives.) It leads to warmer oceans which is troubling for all the coral reefs out there, where the majority of marine life start their food chains. Warmer weather means more droughts which leads to desertification of land. Less lakes and trees and plants. Bad news for humans. Mass-extinction of species is also happening, which humans eventually could be one of the unlucky ones. Very bad news all around.
But this is all kind of happening slowly, so it kind of falls outside our definition of ‘news’. News in 2014 is something that happens very fast, with lots of developments and plot twists, and something that is usually over in a couple of days. The only way to make global warming news is to ask what people think, because opinions are news too, dontyouknow. Luckily for news stations everywhere people seem have a lot of opinions in 2014! And, boy, are they encouraged to voice them.
I first started to take notice because of Yelp. Don’t get me wrong, I rely on Yelp as much as the next person when finding a competent doctor or just the phone number to a particular restaurant but once you are on Yelp you can’t help but read the reviews. Some are funny, some are unfair, some are helpful but mostly they tend to be very long. Like seven paragraphs long. About buying frozen yogurt. I mean, dude, it took you five times longer to bitch about your yogurt-buying experience than it did to eat the damn yogurt. So I thought, maybe this is a sign that deep inside every person is a writer that is just dying to spring forth and release literary genius on unsuspecting window shoppers online. Because people put a lot of effort into these reviews – how they were greeted, who they were with, what they ate complete with pictures, and whether or not they got free birthday desert. Clearly stuff of vital importance to no one. 
And then it hit me, this is not about writing – if they liked writing they would get a blog – this is about having opinions.
And then I started noticing it everywhere. This excessive plea for uneducated opinions. I like to watch crime shows like 48 Hours (they have them on YouTube) and after each 45 minutes episode laying out evidence of murder that usually ends with conviction, the show will end in a dramatic voice over: “Do you think s/he is guilty? What would you have voted if you were on the jury? Chat now with Twiddlebum on Twitter and Facebook!” And without fail I get angry. Because for once, in a shut-and-done murder case, it is perfectly okay to not have an opinion. All I know of this case is what the TV show showed me, I don’t have access to the evidence and I haven’t spend months or years reading up on it, so I’m pretty sure my opinion is completely invalid right now and for all foreseeable future. And that’s ok! It is totally ok not to have an opinion on every little thing.
But, oh no, the media can’t have that. They want to know what you think of celebrities dresses on the red carpet, they want to know what you think of politics, of wars, of movies, and of science. Millions of people actually spend money to vote on reality shows like American Idol and the countless imitators that came after. We have been conditioned to have so many fucking opinions on unimportant shit that now we seem to think we can ‘opinionize’ our way out of global warming by simply choosing to ‘not believe’ in it.
I don’t need to show you the reports by actual scientists who spend their days, years, and decades studying the actual conditions of planet Earth. Most of them are saying we are past the point of no return and even if we stop polluting today, there will still be repercussions felt by future generations. Plastic, toxic and acidic are the legacies we leave behind. And it’s cool not to want to change our behavior. That’s valid choice. But at least we should own up to that choice and stop hiding like cowards behind all these opinions.
P.S. Turns out ‘asshat’ isn’t such a big part of my vocabulary as I thought when I started this. But that’s ok. Go on Yelp. You’ll find them. In fact, you can’t miss them.
If you’re as fed up with the ridiculous mainstream media as I am, check out my guide to finding real news on YouTube. Breaking the Set’s Abby Martin remains my spirit animal. After all, we are both 30 year old angry white women with a lot of opinions ;)
I spend a lot of time on this blog talking about what I don’t believe and how I think the way we live should be different. That’s necessary, but also kind of a bummer. So what exactly do I believe in?
My evolution to get here was about as long as my life. I feel like I’ve lived a very typical, Western, white girl life. I grew up with non-religious, non-judgmental, supportive parents, and I was encourage to go to school above everything else. I had my very mild rebellious teenage phase. For a split second I wanted to be Wiccan, then atheist, then just travel the world because, fuck it, life is short. I mocked the concept of God as a man in the sky with white beard, I still kind of do, sorry. But somewhere along the line I did develop spirituality. And it’s science-based, somehow.
As much as I can’t get on board when people say “God” because I feel too much evil has been used in “God’s” name, I do very much believe in energies. I love the absolute fact that energy cannot be created or destroyed – just transformed. Because that means every single thing we see or think or are, has been around since the beginning of the universe. It is assumed that right now, our life form, is third generation star dust. I love that. When the universe was created there were only hydrogen and helium. Then those elements fused in nuclear stars for billions of years, and eventually the collapse of those stars led to the creation of new elements. We are a carbon-based life form, so we are third generation of those fusions. That means the matter that I’m made of have been around since the dawn of time; I’m just wearing it in a different form. That’s the physical aspect of belief.
The spiritual aspect is even better. I do believe in the soul. I think it’s the conscious aspect of being alive, and that’s why we’re all a little bit different but mostly the same. Who knows, maybe it really does weight 21 grams and at the time of our death it leaves our body. That would be pretty cool. I think our soul is the collective intelligence of the universe and when we are born we are infused with our own little piece of it. It doesn’t belong to the piece of flesh we happen to be wearing at the time; this is a concept way beyond our ‘ego’. Our ego, or identity, is created within the society we happen to be born into. I happen to come from materialistic, individualized culture so my ego happens to be particularly strong but I try not to hold that against myself. I don’t believe my ego is my soul. My soul is so much bigger than my ego. My ego will die with me; my soul will simply leave my body at the time of my death and return to the universe’s lifestream. Is this a finite resource? I don’t know. I’m not that smart.
But I do believe in soul mates. I have had it happen too many times not to. It is when you meet someone and your soul instantly recognizes them. Whether it is a physical attraction or just friendship, it is when you meet someone and you know that this is your person. And I think you have multiple people throughout your lifetime. Friends, lovers, husbands and wives. How else can you explain locking eyes with someone across the room and having a physical reaction. I call it the ‘jolt’. It happens when I see someone I have never seen before but as soon as we lock eyes, my body will jolt, as if struck by lightening. I used to be embarrassed by this. I used to think it was just finding someone cute in a crowd, like our culture teaches us. It couldn’t possibly be a cosmic, spiritual reunion. But it is that strong. It’s finding someone cute in a crowd, and having your soul recognize them from whatever souls usually do when they are not trapped in human form, and wanting to reconnect. That’s how I met my husband. That’s how I learned some of the biggest truths about myself. Of course, being soul mates is just the beginning of the journey. Marriage is first and foremost about commitment. Some days I run into other soul mates of mine. My body jolts. Our eyes lock for the first time. But I choose my husband because my ego wants to remain pure and loved by only one person. Your soul is playful and adventurous. Sometimes you’ve got to keep it in check.
And that’s why I’m so angry all the time. If I believed we were just stupid monkeys coming to the end of our life cycle, I would be fine with us polluting and trashing our home into extinction. But I believe we are so much more than that! We are billions of years of universal evolution and we should know better. Right now our minds are hijacked by the culture we live in, but deep down, we know this isn’t right. We can sense it. Our connection to the universe will not allow us to be happy in such a self-centered, destructive state.
I used to travel the world with songs like these on repeat. I think if I have an addiction it is the beginnings of things. I liked drifting from city to city, always just a visitor. I do not put down roots anywhere. There is a tantalizing sadness in not belonging. A sweet ache deep in your stomach knowing that you possess absolute freedom but at a cost not many people is willing to pay.
For almost four years I forgot what that feeling was like. I made a beautiful home in a beautiful place with my love. There was no money to travel. I didn’t mind. I was so focused on following The Path. Finish school. Get a job. Make money. Save money. Because money is key, right? I lasted less than two weeks. That sweet ache in the pit of my stomach returned with such a vengeance I couldn’t breathe. The twist being, of course, that now I was too connected. I was no longer a ghost floating above earth. I was a solid shape that left footprints. “Run away, just run, start over,” the ache tells me. But at some point there is no more running away. Too many decisions has lead you here. Student debt and all the knowledge that came with it have narrowed down my infinite possibilities to just a handful of possibilities. Not to mention I actually love my husband and our home, and the world would be even more of an empty void without them.
That’s new. If running away, ignore, start over, isn’t an option then all that is left is me. And if I have to stay, really stay on this planet in this existence, the one thing that doesn’t make me want to lie down and die, is being a writer. All my life I always assumed that at one point, one day, I would become a writer but I have never actually made the decision to be a writer. I know that doesn’t sound like much but it’s a huge thing for me. This time last week I couldn’t stop crying and life seemed absolutely pointless and painful to boost. Then it finally clicked. If this is what I want to do, just do it. When I was 20 and the ache got too bad, I just left. I made the decision and I left because leaving was easier than staying. Goodbyes were heartbreaking and beautiful. I left because life should be about infinite possibilities and I couldn’t find them where I was. So I made the decision again. I am going to be a writer. There is no plan B anymore. Do you know what that feels like?
Infinite possibilities, but better. Because if I fail, I still have a life that I love.
And this album is amazing. Get it.
i like songs about drifters / books about the same
they both seem to make me feel a little less insane
walked on off to another spot
i still haven’t gotten anywhere that i wanti know that starting over is not what life’s about
but my thoughts were so loud i couldn’t hear my mouthmodest mouse – the world at large
album: good news for people who love bad news
As a curious atheist with only an academic interest in religion I have over some time now come up with the following working theory: celebrities are modern day gods. I think it makes perfect sense. I mean, it really is the only way to explain the amount of coverage someone like Kim Kardashian is able to receive in a time where we have so many actual problems facing our existence on this planet.
We have more media than ever before, for the first time in history being published doesn’t cost anything. We have phones, tablets, computers, TV and radio are still hanging in there – all designed to give us lightening fast access to information. And wouldn’t you say about roughly 70% of that time spent on these devices is spent talking about ourselves (Facebook), improving our image (Instagram) and gossiping about celebrities and the latest corporate media distraction/sensation?
How did we get here?
Imagine for a moment a world where the currency of choice is apples. It is something that grows freely without a lot of effort from humans. Plant a tree, wait 10-20 years, then harvest. Depending on your level of ambition you can harvest just enough or a lot. But the thing about apples is that they rot. Maybe in a temperature controlled cellar they can last a few years, but hoarding apples eventually becomes an exercise in futility because who would want your old shriveled apples when they can just pick fresh ones from outside? So, in this economy, you are left with three choices: eat the apples, trade the apples, and give away your extras because soon they will become worthless to everyone, including yourself.
Are you with me so far? What do you think would be the guiding principle in such a world? Sharing, of course. Since your apples are no good to you hidden away in a basement left to rot, the most efficient use of them would be to give them away in exchange for status and goodwill in your community. But let’s for a second entertain the idea of a psychopath in this economy. Someone who is only out for himself and derives great pleasure from hoarding and withholding apples from other people. How do you think he would fare in such a society? He would probably be considered more than a little crazy, and he probably wouldn’t have a lot of friends. The very word ‘economy’ actually translates into ‘most efficient and frugal way to accomplish something’. I think it goes without saying that our modern concept of economy is perversely distorted. Read More
The fall down the rabbit hole is a long one – and often very painful. Once you start to deconstruct reality around you, you tend to alienate a lot of people. They are perfectly adjusted and don’t need your philosophical musings, thank you very much.
Vote with your dollars is something you will hear well-meaning sustainability-leaning people say a lot. I used to. I still do, to an extent, but it took a long time to realize just how difficult that is.
The idea behind voting with your dollars is to put your money where your values lie. If you are against animal testing on cosmetics, you make sure to only buy cosmetics that are not tested on animals. Easy, right? Not so fast. Did you know that The Body Shop (the most famous worldwide company for natural and ethically produced beauty products) is owned by L’oreal? I didn’t, and that’s when I tumbled into this particular rabbit hole. Read More
honeythatsok 